Good Morning!!

Yesterday Politico published one of their bizarre pieces about the trials and tribulations of the whiny Village media. According to Dylan Byers, the White House press corps experienced ‘Extreme frustration’ over ‘having absolutely no access’ to Obama during his brief golfing vacation over the long Presidents’ Day weekend.

Ed Henry, the Fox News correspondent and president of the White House Correspondents Association, released a statement Sunday evening in which he said the press corps had been given no access to the president, who was joined on his outing by star golfer Tiger Woods, and that the WHCA would fight for greater transparency in the days ahead.

“Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend,” Henry said in a statement, relayed in a White House pool report. “There is a very simple but important principle we will continue to fight for today and in the days ahead: transparency.”

Has Ed Henry ever complained about the White House press not getting access to information about drone strikes? Has he released any statements about the White House not being “transparent” about the DOJ defending Bush’s torture policies or involvement by the administration in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz?

Ed Henry with Kim Kardashian

No, it’s only when the press corps sees an opportunity for star-fucking. Obama goes golfing with Tiger Woods and wants a little privacy–probably requested by Woods–and the press corps goes nuts over lack of “transparency.” Here’s the White House response to the kerfluffle:

“The press access granted by the White House today is entirely consistent with the press access offered for previous presidential golf outings,” Earnest said. “It’s also consistent with the press access promised to the White House Press Corps prior to arrival in Florida on Friday evening.”

Excuse me if I don’t see this as a major issue. But for Politico, it’s earth-shaking. This morning they’ve posted another of their “Behind the Curtain” exposes by Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen, and, as usual, it’s hilarious. Get this–the headline is “Obama, the puppet master.”

President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.

Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.

No, this is not a gag post from the Onion. Vandehei and Allen are deadly serious about what they see as a scandalous situation. They are horrified to report that the Obama administration likes to use new technologies like e-mail and social media to communicate with the American people instead of just letting the DC media filter their message for them.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

OMG! Scandalous!! And that’s just the beginning of a four-page article. Because this isn’t just about an outing with Tiger Woods. Oh no! It’s a vital national security isssue . . . or something. Turning to another related piece at Politico–this is obviously the issue of the week for them–Ed Henry says “This isn’t about a golf game.”

White House Correspondents Association president Ed Henry is standing by his complaints about the lack of press access to President Obama, pushing back against critics who say he and his fellow White House correspondents are just “whining” and don’t respect the president’s privacy.

“This is a fight for more access, period,” Henry told POLITICO late Monday night. “I’ve heard all kinds of critics saying the White House press corps is whining about a golf game and violating the president’s privacy. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“We’re not interested in violating the president’s privacy. He’s entitled to vacations like everyone else. All we’re asking for is a brief exception, quick access, a quick photo-op on the 18th green,” Henry continued. “It’s not about golf — it’s about transparency and access in a broader sense.”

“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”

So why doesn’t the press complain during and after those big meetings then? And then there’s this:

“White House handout photos used to be reserved for historically important events — 9/11, or deliberations about war,” Kraft said. “This White House regularly releases [day-in-the-life] images of the president … a nice picture of the president looking pensive … from events that could have been covered by the press pool. But I don’t blame the White House for doing it, because networks and newspapers use them. So the White House has built its own content distribution network.”

The Bush administration acknowledged on Friday that it had paid a third conservative commentator, and at least two departments said they were conducting internal inquiries to see if other journalists were under government contract. The investigative arm of Congress also formally began an inquiry of its own.

The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed having hired Michael McManus, who writes a weekly syndicated column and is director of a nonprofit group called Marriage Savers. Mr. McManus was paid $10,000 to help train counselors about marriage, an arrangement first reported in USA Today, but officials said he was paid for his expertise rather than to write columns supporting administration policies.

At the same time, the Government Accountability Office told the Education Department it was investigating a $240,000 contract with the commentator Armstrong Williams that came to light earlier this month, requesting that education officials turn over any paper or video materials related to the case. Another conservative writer, Maggie Gallagher, admitted earlier this week having a $21,500 deal with the Department of Health and Human Services.

Besieged with questions about contracts with outside public relations firms and columnists, officials at the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services said they were conducting their own inquiries…

When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at the New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors note published Wednesday. The editors wrote:

“We have found … instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been … In some cases, the information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge … We consider the story of Iraq’s weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business. And we fully intend to continue aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record straight.”

The editors conceded what intelligence sources had told me and numerous other reporters: that Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi was feeding bad information to journalists and the White House and had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles where all of the influential institutions were shouting into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. “Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many news organizations — in particular, this one.”

The reporter on many of the flawed stories at issue was Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and authority on the Middle East. The Times, insisting that the problem did not lie with any individual journalist, did not mention her name. The paper was presumably trying to take the high road by defending its reporter, but the omission seems peculiar. While her editors must share a large portion of the blame, the pieces ran under Miller’s byline. It was Miller who clearly placed far too much credence in unreliable sources, and then credulously used dubious administration officials to confirm what she was told.

That’s hardly ancient history, is it?

Here are a couple of good reactions to the Politico articles, while we wait for Charles Pierce to write about how he could barely keep himself from gargling anti-freeze this morning.

Eight years of accusing the Clintons of every possible crime, up to and including large-scale drug running and multiple murders, followed by eight years of dutifully promulgating whatever bullshit and phantasms the Cheney Regency invented, and the Very Serious Media is shocked, shocked that President Obama would rather “spend way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities”. Or that “Obama’s aides are better at using technology and exploiting the president’s ‘brand.’… [T]hey are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forums, not just for campaigns, but governing.”

The good news is that the Villagers don’t waste a lot of time and energy worrying about transparency when it comes to trivial information that is only interesting to gossip columnists. For instance, nobody’s issuing any ultimatums over silly issues like this:

For a country exhausted after more than a decade of war, remote-controlled drones—unmanned machines that deliver swift death to terrorists—are undeniably tempting. President Obama has ordered hundreds of strikes on “high-value,” as well as medium- and low-value, targets in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. The administration says these killings have decimated al-Qaeda’s top ranks and done significant damage to the Taliban but refuses to say much more. Obama has yet to explain the basics of the broader policy: how decisions are made to send drones across sovereign borders; how officials determine a target is dangerous enough to merit assassination; what oversight is in place; and what is done to limit civilian casualties

I’m awfully relieved that the fourth estate has its priorities straight.

So…that should get you started on your morning’s reading. I’ll have some links on other topics in the comments section. Now, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

On the May 1, 2003, edition of Hardball, Chris Matthews was joined by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter and “Democrat” Pat Caddell.

MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you’re the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president’s performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan — what do you think?

COULTER: It’s stunning. It’s amazing. I think it’s huge. I mean, he’s landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It’s tremendous. It’s hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn’t matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It’s stunning, and it speaks for itself.

MATTHEWS: Pat Caddell, the president’s performance tonight on television, his arrival on ship?…

CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him — I mean, he seems like — he didn’t fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

Later that day, on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, Matthews said:

MATTHEWS: We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical, who’s not a complicated guy like [former President Bill] Clinton or even like [former Democratic presidential candidates Michael] Dukakis or [Walter] Mondale, all those guys, [George] McGovern. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits. We don’t want an indoor prime minister type, or the Danes or the Dutch or the Italians, or a [Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin. Can you imagine Putin getting elected here? We want a guy as president.

On the May 7, 2003, edition of Hardball, Matthews asked former Nixon administration official G. Gordon Liddy what he thought of the response to Bush’s landing on the Abraham Lincoln. Looking at the footage, Liddy commented that Bush’s flight suit made “the best of his manly characteristic.”

When it looked like Rudy Giuliani was about to enter the POTUS race he practically wet his pants! He is practically salivating over Chris Christie these days so some things never change.

But looking back at that excerpt you provided shows how disturbed this man really is. Hindsight has proven that this war was “sold” to the public by a series of lies and obsfucation and reading those comments are sickening.

If memory serves, Chris was never in favor of the war but he certainly held these weasels in high esteem.

The only person I heard mention yesterday that the press failed completely was Isakoff, If anyone else said a word, I missed it. That still seems to be a closely guarded secret. We must have a better press corps!

The Falcon has an eight-foot wingspan but weighs just 9.5 pounds. Powered by an electric motor, it carries two swiveling cameras, visible and infrared, and a GPS-guided autopilot. Sophisticated enough that it can’t be exported without a U.S. government license, the Falcon is roughly comparable, Miser says, to the Raven, a hand-launched military drone—but much cheaper. He plans to sell two drones and support equipment for about the price of a squad car.

A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes.

Around the country, a small but growing number of localities are considering the use of domestic drones—aircraft that are smaller, lighter, and cheaper (though not much less controversial) than what the military uses in Afghanistan. Police departments could outfit drones with infrared sensors that see through walls, facial recognition software, or technology that intercepts calls and emails. Yet the the federal government doesn’t do much to regulate how drones can use such technologies to collect information on private citizens….

Last year, Congress passed a law mandating that the Federal Aviation Administration open up US airspace to drones, and the FAA made it easier for law enforcement and other “public agencies” to get a drone permit. Records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) indicate that at least 81 public entities—including 17 sheriff’s and police departments—have petitioned the agency for the right to fly drones.

I’ll make an admission that might not be too popular, but I watched Olbermann because he challenged the Bush Administration almost from the beginning. (Of course, Keith got carried away with his own “hubris” and became a pain in the ass after awhile but he did speak up to power at a time when few did.)

This set the stage for a little feud between Matthews and Olbermann when each had difficulty hiding their contempt of one another.

Keith also began to challenge the Obama administration which set the stage for his firing at MSNBC. His irritable personality didn’t help but he refused to see Obama through the lens of “will he be the best president ever?” club that Matthews touts.

So in my own way I have to admit sort of “missing Keith” to some extent. He refused to “play kiss ass” which is the world that Matthews dwells in.

“Anyone ever hear of pocket tweet, pocket dial? I mean it was pretty simple. I have an iPhone 5. If anyone has iPhone 5, the keys are small. It’s very, very sensitive. Ayla was teaching me how to get on Facebook and Twitter, and there were some areas I didn’t really understand,” Brown said to a local Fox station. “After her concert, we were here in the living room and responded to a couple of people and then put it in my pocket.”

On Jan. 26, Brown tweeted three messages after midnight — “Your brilliant Matt,” “Whatever” and “Bqhatevwr” — that drew attention because the former senator has kept an exceptionally low public profile since leaving the Senate and the announcement of the special election to fill Kerry’s seat. They were later deleted.

Ireland’s prime minister is expected to issue a state apology Tuesday to the thousands of Irish women who spent years working without pay in a defunct network of prison-style laundries run by Catholic nuns.

Former residents of the Magdalene Laundries have campaigned for the past decade for the government to apologize and pay compensation to an estimated 1,000 survivors of the workhouses.

Obama and Tiger Woods were joined on the golf course by a very wealthy fellow named Jim Crane. We all know who Tiger Woods is, but who is Jim Crane? The Texas businessman who hosted the president at his exclusive golf resort is owner of the major league baseball team Houston Astros. But Crane is also mucked up with the very “Big Oil” the activists were railing against. His extensive business deals include a partnership in Western Gas Holdings, a company engaged in gathering, processing, compressing and transporting natural gas and crude oil for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, one of the world’s largest publicly traded oil and gas exploration and production companies.

This happened at the same time as the protests in front of the White House against the Keystone pipeline.

Yeah, O has done this before. He uses the time honored male bastion of golf games, to meet with others he might not invite to the WH, or be seen in public with, and TW was probably a decoy. TW has played with O before. One notable time was with Clinton in tow, and just as TW’s scandal broke.

Anyone remember his trip to the Virgin Islands in 2008? That happened just as the media was cutting back on overseas travel expenses. Right wingers say he has gone on over 100 golf trips. It’s hard for the media to follow him around to these secret meetings and he knows it.

Maybe it’s just the ever-sunny optimist in me, but I have a vague and happy thoughtbubble, the size of a child’s balloon, that the Middle Way “movement” in this country, the whole anti-partisanship, undecided voter mindset, is turning away, not from the Republican party, which even it has had to recognize for some time now as the source of the problems it was complaining about, but from the Beltway insider view of the problem. Which, if I may summarize, is that there aren’t enough John McCains in the Congress.

Matthews now likes to call himself a “liberal.” Yeah, he who not so many years past talked about his republican roots and leanings, how he liked reading the weekly standard, spoke with starry eyes about Bush’s “sunny nobility.” I guess he likes whomever he perceives to be in a position of power.

Every sportswriter learns one simple rule in a very quick hurry — namely, that nobody out in your readership cares how hard you think your job is. People, to paraphrase Michael J. Fox’s channelling of the Stephanoplouli in The American President, don’t give a damn about your problems, they give a damn about their own. Therefore, columns about media shuttles being late, or cold food in the press room, or the quality of the bath towels in the headquarters hotels become the object of swift and righteous ridicule on the part of the people who read them. This is a lesson apparently lost on the elite political press, and especially on the presiding geniuses behind Tiger Beat On The Potomac.

I totally agree with you BB. Schieffer was whining about the golf outing on CBS yesterday and again today. If the press had a scintilla of integrity themselves I might concede that they had a point but please! We didn’t hear about Cheney and his quail “hunting” at his girlfriend’s place until after he shot somebody in the face. The press corps went after Clinton with all they had because his administration cleaned up the corruption in the travel office and didn’t kiss the press corps’ collective asses as much as they demanded. Screw the hacks. I love that the Obama administration is speaking directly to the people. If the press spent time doing real journalism, they would have time to worry about sneaking peeks at Tiger Woods.

The WH press corpse is totally useless and has been for decades. Helen Thomas was the last of a breed of journalists who actually gave a damn about what is REALLY happening behind closed doors in the halls of power. The rest of them are more interested in flying hither and yon on the WH corps ticket, spending their per diem and rubbing elbows with the rich, famous, important, i.e. Tiger Woods.

That’s me, the poorest, officially broke.
I need a job, but I desperately hate retail. If there become no jobs in retail because nobody has any money to spend, then I won’t have to get a job in that hated field. It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good.
Still not happy about the news, of course.

Maybe Wally World finally outgrew themselves. They opened up a newer bigger one last year here, cause don’t ya know, the old one was too outdated. Though I don’t go near WM I do note that the parking lot is always crowded. Target has responded with the addition of food coolers.

I have an idea that this expansion won’t last, however. As a counterpunch, Raley’s Groceries has expanded their organic produce section. More of us are looking for better food and better quality.

“No, it’s only when the press corps sees an opportunity for star-fucking. Obama goes golfing with Tiger Woods and wants a little privacy–probably requested by Woods–and the press corps goes nuts over lack of “transparency.”

They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.

Everybody sing! “One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same.” No, stop, seriously, you’re killing me, fellas. Yeah, the president is hiding under the bed because he’s afraid one of your tyros is going to get all up in his grill with a stone-killer “Some people say you’re an uppity schmuck” kind of question. A lecture about how the White House catapults propaganda from the home office of the “Some Republican strategists say…” school of anonymous political slander? A seminar in the propagation of bullshit from the the country’s largest gossip silo? How in the hell do the people at the Times, the Post, and the WSJ feel about your lumping yourself in there with them? Who the fck are you when you’re at home?

ROFLOL! I almost highlighted that line where Politico compares itself to the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ, but my post was getting too long.

Here we go: St. Louis Post Dispatch just reported that St. Louis County will send fellow colleagues to prison for introducing gun control legislation………………..Ain’t over yet, Mississippi has just developed a committee to push nullification and negate all federal laws………….Tea Party nuts with big balls.

In a meticulously planned heist that took barely five minutes to execute, armed men disguised as police officers drove onto the tarmac at the international airport in Brussels Monday night and stole diamonds worth around $50 million as they were being loaded onto a plane bound for Switzerland, officials said.

About our Banner

The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.

You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.